Field notes from the front of customer research.
Essays, teardowns, and short notes on building product with customers in the room. Written by the team at Corha.
A persona that can't say no isn't doing any work
Most personas are built from things that are true of everyone, values simplicity, wants to save time, so they can't rule anything out and end up agreeing with whatever you were going to build anyway. A persona that holds real understanding should be able to say no, to look at a feature you like and tell you this person would never want it.
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You only study the customers that stayed
Almost everything you know about your customers comes from the ones still around to be asked. The customer who churned, or the prospect who chose a competitor, leaves almost nothing behind, and yet those are usually the people holding the information you most need.
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Your power users know your product better than you do
I worked for a while on an analytics tool with its own in-house query language, and a small group of power users started writing queries in it that were more sophisticated than anything the people who built the language had imagined. The instinct is to file that under noise, a weird technical tail, when it was closer to a forecast, and following it made the whole product more powerful for everyone.
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In a two-sided marketplace, one of your customers is invisible
Early in my career, and fairly new to conversion work, I spent a while on a tutoring marketplace, where one set of people book and pay and another set actually teach, and the two wanted quite different things from the same screens. The trouble is that your conversion metric lives on the buyer's side, so the whole optimisation machine leans that way, and in a marketplace the side you neglect is the one you're actually selling.
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The average customer is a person who doesn't exist
In 1950 the US Air Force measured 4,063 pilots to design a better cockpit around the average airman, and found that the average airman didn't exist. The composite persona is the same move, and it carries the same quiet risk: a figure that summarises everyone and resembles no one, built by averaging away the very spread your product decisions depend on.
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Knowing your customer is not the same as having met them
"We know our customers" is usually said to end an argument, and usually it means the team met them once, a while ago, and has been running on the memory ever since. I learned the difference the hard way, building an entire prototype for insurance brokers on a belief about them that light research had quietly waved through. This is a piece about why meeting your customers is an event, knowing them is a state, and why teams keep mistaking the first for the second.
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What I've been building
After a decade in early-stage startups, I've watched teams do good research and then quietly lose the insights three weeks later, more times than I can count. I've come to believe personas should be representations you can interact with, not documents you reference, and that customer understanding belongs in a continuous state, not in a folder somewhere. Corha is what I've been wanting to use the whole time, and this is the piece on why I'm building it.
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Why most personas die in the doc that created them
Most user personas die quietly in the document that created them, ignored by the teams they were built for. This piece looks at why that keeps happening, and what it takes to treat personas as a living state rather than a one-off artefact.
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One or two thoughtful emails a month on customer research, product, and the practical reality of working with AI.